Position Paper for HPTS 2001
E-business, e-science
and transaction processing
Charles Brett
C3B Consulting Ltd
The concept of an ‘Information grid’ – akin to an electricity or water or gas grid – has been extensively
discussed recently, especially after the ‘The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure’ was
written by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman. In many circles there is excitement, even though the practical
and technological details of how such a Grid might work – and who will pay for it – are still decidedly
hazy. Government, science and commerce are all showing interest – in varying degrees and ways.
While such a Grid would be of great use to e-business, I would argue that the absence of both a
commercial model and the necessary transaction software understructure more or less ensures that early
investment will not come from companies which have an eye for profit. In turn this more or less ensures
that either government or the science community will need to pick up the baton if progress is to be made.
That said, my researches and discussions suggest that most significant governments will either be too
slow to move or will act through third parties (so called quangos – quasi autonomous non governmental
organizations, for the uninitiated) - and the like, rather than directly.
This leaves science as the most likely progenitor, not least because it has the big projects – like the LHC
at CERN, NASA, proteomics, protein folding, astronomy, climatology, etc. – all of which need to be able
to communicate massive experimental results to large numbers of researchers around the world in a
validated and trustworthy manner. Put another way, it could be left to e-science to evolve the reliable
communication of results and analysis for progress to be made.
It is my contention that HPTS-like transaction processing disciplines are highly relevant to delivering
several key aspects of what will be needed in any grid’s understructure, and this applies both to e-science
as the starting point and e-business as the likely beneficiary down the road. This is so in part because escience lacks much of the transactional and related software understanding (with the one possible
exception being database) needed to make a grid function acceptably and in part because any e-business
grid is likely to build on what e-science has started, with commercial considerations being added.
Areas where it seems to me that HPTS has relevant expertise to offer (outside pure database) could
include high performance, web transactions, semantics and metadata, abstraction, integrity, authorization
and authentication, process security, accurate ‘data curation’ (as in a curator of information), etc. In
addition, I would argue that we (HPTS) have much practical experience and understanding of what might
work for a commercial grid to be successful – and this could materially accelerate the evolution and
development of a broader e-business understructure.
What also seems reasonably clear, at least to me, is that e-science will re-invent much of what we (HPTS)
have already researched and explored. I would prefer to see us involved up front – rather than being
‘wise afterwards’. Both sides have much to gain from each other, if they but realize.
Charles Brett
Winchester: April, 2001